DEUTSCHER DESCRIBES "TEACH-IN" MOVEMENT
7 At the national "teach-in" held in Washington May 15 [see World Outlook May 28], a representative of the European intellectual community was invited to participate. The guest selected by the committee in charge of arrangements was, interestingly enough, Isaac © Deutscher, the well-known biographer of Leon Trotsky.
He presented his views at the Washington meeting, which was televised across the United States to about 100 campuses making up an audience of 100,000. Deutscher then crossed the country, speak-~ ing at a number of universities, and participated in a giant debate at the University of California in Berkeley. From all the reports, he was very well received and drew heavy applause from the audiences of students and teachers.
The Tribune, a left-wing weekly of the British Labour move-~ ment, published the full text of the notes from which Deutscher prepared his speech Lin two issues, May 21 and May 28]. The document offers a very good popular presentation of the revolutionary Marxist view of the broad lines of American and Soviet foreign policy since the end of World War II, ending in the present grave situation in Vietnam which may be the prelude to a nuclear conflict. LFor anyone wishing these two issues of Tribune, the address is 222 The Strand, London, W.C.2, and the cost is two shillings -- $.28.]
The Paris weekly Express [June 7] has published Deutscher's impressions of his trip. These are of considerable interest.
For the first time since the end of the war, Deutscher writes, a formidable clamor has arisen in the United States over foreign policy, specifically Johnson's policy in Vietnam and Latin America,
"The clamor is being stirred up by the young American generation. In almost all the universities, thousands of professors and hundreds of thousands of students are participating in the movement." It began in March and swept the entire country in a little more than’ a month.
Describing the "teach-in" in which he participated in Washington, Deutscher says: "It was not at all comparable with anything generally seen in the British demonstrations on nuclear disarmament: no prophets, no beatniks, no eccentrics. However, there was no doubt about the sentiments of the participants. They listened politely to the defenders of the government's policies. but demonstrated their approval and their enthusiasm each time a critic of the government spoke,"
A "still more radical" meeting was the debate organized at Berkeley. It was an open-air gathering that lasted thirty-six hours, including speeches, reports, political satires, folk songs, one after the other. "Among the speakers were leaders of the Negro civil-rignhts movement, organizers of antisegregationist marches in the South, professors, authors, a senator from Alaska, a Negro member of the Galifornia state assembly, etc." Deutscher found himself speaking after midnight in the cold breeze coming in from the Pacific. But the ; students, 15,000 of them, did not wish to go inside. Deutscher con=": tinued with his Marxist analysis. LHe does not mention it, but other ares report that when he finished he was given a "standing ova~ tion.
Some yards away, "something extraordinary" impressed the historian. Volunteers were giving their blood for the victims of American bombings in Vietnam. One hundred litres were collected under the slogan: “Johnson is sending them napalm; we will send them our blood,"
He heard a suggestion to organize a brigade to help the freedom fighters in Vietnam along the lines of the international brigades in the civil war in Spain.
"To those familiar with the political climate of America inthe past decades, these meetings and these protests must appear, as they did to me -- fantastic innovations. And the way in which this. clamor has found an echo in the written and spoken press, so often sunk in conformism, is a sign that times have changed.”
In estimating the import of this new movement, Deutscher feels ta little skeptical" about the immediate effects it could have, Nevertheless, it serves as a brake on those pushing for escalation of the war. .
The long-range effects, he feels, will prove much more important. "In my opinion, the awakening of the critical attitude in the United States is almost as important as the de-Stalinization in the USSR. In certain respects they resemble each other. A new left is being born that is sweeping away the corpse of the old traumatized left, worn out during the thirties and forties through its collusion with Stalinism, stunned by de-Stalinization and struck down by McCarthyism,”
This new generation, now entering the political arena, "has
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known neither Stalinism nor de-Stalinization. It has not been intimidated by McCarthyism. It is entering politics remorselessly, fearlessly... It is engaging in struggle with innocence and courage. It reacts. vigorously against the anti-Communist clichés and the anti-~- Marxist dogmas, It no longer supports the cold-war indoctrination. The Pharisaism and self-conceit of the American ruling class appall it. Aware of the gaps in the general prosperity, the vast continuing ‘pockets. of pgverty,' the 'structural employment' in the midst of full economic expansion, the oppression of the Negroes, it wants to indict the whole establishéd order,'
Deutscher is not prepared to predict how far this generation will go. It is too early. "But there is not the least doubt that Marxism will appear or reappear in the United States as an intellectual and moral force and that this force will appear much more attractive than ever before."
“Deutscher ascribes the origin of this movement to the struggle opened by the Negroes against racial segregation. They broke the “magic vise" of American conformism and served as a catalyzer for the young radical intellectuals,
“He: ends by stating that the debates are the "first phase of the rebirth of an active social consciousness in the United States." The next phase cannot be foreseen. “When I left the United States, the organizers of the debates were discussing how to widen the basis of the movement. Whatever comes of it, there is no doubt that it has already transformed the politico-moral climate of the country."